WASHline

The phenomenon of evolution has been utilized for the last ten thousand years or so by our ancestors.

They exploited two physical facts: individual organisms' offspring of each generation differ by chance from one another, and the differences are transmissible to successive generations.

By selecting traits desirable to the agriculturist or herder, our antecedents bred dogs from wolves, edible grains from grasses, olive trees from oleasters. This process of directed evolution led to the domestication of virtually all crops and cattle that we use nowadays.

Evolution thus constituted a basic law of nature. It worked-even though we did not understand why or how.

How did it operate without the forcing function of man?

Darwin and Wallace, from observed facts, concluded that it worked just as well, except that the forcing function, instead of man-the-breeder, became the environment.

In each successive generation, some individuals turned out, by chance, to be better adapted than their peers to environmental stimuli such as cold, heat, drought. Better adapted meaning they were able to produce more offspring. The culmination of this effect over the generations, though the centuries eventually led to a new population: not necessarily with traits more desirable to farmer or herder, simply better equipped to withstand certain natural stresses.

That is it - no big mystery. All Darwin did was to unravel the puzzle.